Friday, October 15, 2010

One of the most brilliant analysis of dungeons was written by Melan and can be found on Enworld here. It was posted a while ago but I don't think many know about it outside of a few forums like Knights and Knaves and of course Enworld.

He develops a technique of analyzing how various dungeon flows by using line diagrams. He uses it to analyze several newer and older dungeons including some classics. To summarize, dungeons that are laid out where their encounter proceed in a linear fashions are generally not as well like as those which branches and in his opinion the best dungeons are where the encounters are in various loops that allows the players the full freedom to pick where they go.

I have mixed reactions to the conclusions Melan draws. Heartwise, I'm right there with him. I have great memories of games of "dungeon exploration" as the essence of the game I grew up playing. Unfortunately, it seems the only folks I can find who would consider that entertaining are people I only know virtually. And the "giants adventures" by Gygax were some of the adventures I remember enjoying most as a player --- and they seem to have a more 'linear' arrangement than most mega-dungeons (i.e.: you have to fight your way through a lot of guards to get to the end of the adventure (where you go on to the next giant stronghold). The flesh-and-blood players I know are pretty bored by the idea of the 'dungeon as the campaign.' Part of it may be how we play now. We are lucky if we can manage to get together for 4 to 5 hours every 2 weeks to play. Back when we were kids, we could play several times a week.

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.